Apparently, Black men are not allowed to vote with our economic interests. Black men must back Harris, Harris must #WinWithBlackMen, and we must "protect the sister," as Van Jones put it on CNN. That's been the message since the party announced that Vice President Kamala Harris would be replacing President Joe Biden in the November presidential election against former President Trump.
It seems that Harris is entitled to the Black male vote simply because she is a Black woman. I do not recall an election where working-class Black men resoundingly decided that Harris should be the party's nominee for U.S. president. But apparently, that's irrelevant. Apparently, we're not allowed to question the best candidate or best economic policy for us. Instead, we are expected to surrender our vote to party leadership and pull the lever based on the candidate's race and gender.
Are the livelihoods of Black men so disposable that we are to be denied the opportunity of pursuing our own economic interests? What if Trump's immigration policies and rhetoric do help Black men in the labor market? Without instigating a civil war within the Black community, I do not appreciate watching Democratic party elites ensure Vice President Harris is free to ignore political solutions to the economic degradation of Black people.
When it comes to policy, she's only been clear about one issue: abortion. Yet abortion should not be the only issue Black men vote on. To my mind, abortion should not be the only issue any demographic votes on, because the issue can never be resolved in a nation that embraces religious pluralism. Leaving it up to the states is in the spectrum of acceptable compromises, even if it is not my ideal. if we are going to talk about anything else, ever, as a matter of national politics.
But there is a prominent policy issue that impacts Black men and our earning potential—and unfortunately, Harris is bizarrely on every side of it. That issue is immigration. Trump may talk about immigration in ways the average Democrat finds off-putting, but Black men benefit from his immigration politics. It turns out, unscrupulous employers will hire illegal immigrants for jobs historically done by Black workers, and when the nation shuts off the supply of illegal immigrants, the leftover Black workers enjoy increased power in the labor market.
Even if you disagree with the points, candidates who oppose Trump should, at the very least, be pressed to explain to Black people how they are going to secure Black workers jobs at higher wages.
Instead, Black men are being told that we'd better shut up and vote for Harris.
At some level, I do hope Kamala Harris wins a majority of the Black vote. The Democratic Party has been relatively more receptive to Black civil and political concerns. But Trump is the one talking about Black jobs, while the Democrats are offering videos of Harris dancing and holiday cards of the Obama family, rather than the promise good jobs at fair wages.
Despite the horror stories, I am not convinced that Trump is an existential threat to democracy. I lived through his first presidency along with the rest of the nation. We were all there to see democracy not fall apart.
And the Democratic Party is not the answer to our inadequate political processes. Democratic leadership ghouls ran Senator Diane Feinstein into the grave, and those same characters were content to distort the 2024 presidential primary process to do the same for Joe Biden, until Biden was exposed in the first debate. The two top congressional Democrats for the last decade, Nancy Pelosi and Jim Clyburn, have refused to debate any of their primary challengers, lest Democratic primary voters be allowed to evaluate other options.
To my mind, Pelosi and Clyburn's casual disregard for deliberative democracy is a much greater threat to the nation than anything that happened on January 6th.
Many of my concerns would be redressed if Harris were to stump specifically for programs that grow Black asset-ownership. Yet her record in California, a state that is shedding Black people, suggests a casual indifference to the pitiable state of Black asset-ownership. The Black homeownership rate is 43 percent nation-wide—30 points lower than the 72 percent white homeownership rate. It does not matter whether you believe, like I do, that the low Black homeownership rate is a result of generations of government policy that racially targeted Black life, or you think that Black communities are simply unlucky. The stable increase in housing prices nation-wide is set to consign future generations of Black Americans to the fundamental instability of living from cradle to grave in the rental market.
I am not convinced that you can be free in the United States knowing that your children and grandchildren will not at least be homeowners. On these issues, Democrats conventionally offer rent control as a form of palliative care. But I do not want palliative care for my people. I want the secure conditions of self-determination, which include asset-ownership.
Will Harris speak to this worry? We have had national policy around these issues before. From the Homestead Acts to New Deal Housing legislation, we have had federal policies that acknowledge the centrality of property ownership to freedom. Yet at the time, those policies were calibrated to exclude Black people, and as a result, many of their descendants are still renting today.
But I am supposed to vote for Harris without expecting her to address this concern. I am supposed to be quiet and get in line because she is a Black woman with better abortion politics than her opponent.
I am not convinced by Harris, and I demand convincing. But apparently, it is both misogynistic and racist to demand in a democracy that Harris supply a vision of government that speaks to Black economic interests.
If this is the case, then I think democracy demands that people accept being called misogynist and racist and continue to demand adequate economic policies from our politicians. That will be my plan going forward for the next four months.
Irami Osei-Frimpong is a Georgia-based writer who runs www.funkyacademic.com.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
